Paul Crider is a husband and father living in the San Francisco Bay Area. He daylights as a semiconductor engineer but otherwise likes to spend his time reading and writing.
No modern defense of democracy needs to rely solely on first principles. Unlike our liberal forebears who struggled to constrain the arbitrary and expansive powers of kings and aristocrats, we know that representative, constitutional democracy works. The hockey-stick plot of per capita income over the centuries that the economic historian
It’s beginning to sound cliché to say liberalism is in crisis, but anti-liberal parties are on the rise across Europe, Brexit is generally understood to be a setback for liberalism, and in America, Donald Trump rode anti-liberal sentiments to power and early signs point to a deeply anti-liberal agenda.
In moments of crisis for the liberal democratic system, it’s worth asking ourselves whether the system is even worth it. When human rights are being violated and unjust wars waged in our names, when some of us can be killed by the authorities with impunity, and when a liberal